The Internet of Things Connectivity Binge: What Are the Implications?

China uncovers massive underground network of Apple employees selling customers’ personal data Hong Kong Free Press 

Meet Zerodium, the company that pays $1 million for Apple hacks CNN

Look at This Massive Click Fraud Farm that Was Just Busted In Thailand Motherboard 

The Internet is changing civil wars. Watch out for these five trends.WaPo

Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War The New Yorker. John Helmer comments:

1. What is new in this account seems of little consequence — a new FBI source complaining he wasn’t listened to; numbers research on tweet-sharing of falsehoods, etc. Pop guns, not smoking guns.

2. Even if true, they don’t go to the heart, or even the surface of the truth — Clinton was a thoroughly corrupt character, the extent of which was more suppressed than exposed by the media, but still, there were enough voters distributed by state to distrust Clinton so much that Trump, being the only alternative, won the election by a whisker...

The Internet Of Things Is Becoming More Difficult To Escape NPR

“Despite wide concern about cyberattacks, outages and privacy violations, most experts believe the Internet of Things will continue to expand successfully the next few years, tying machines to machines and linking people to valuable resources, services and opportunities.”

“The Internet of Things (IoT) is in full flower. The expanding collection of connected things goes mostly unnoticed by the public – sensors, actuators and other items completing tasks behind the scenes in day-to-day operations of businesses and government, most of them abetted by machine-to-machine “computiction” – that is, artificial-intelligence-enhanced communication. The most public items in the burgeoning IoT are cars, voice-activated assistants, appliances and other home systems, physician-prescribed or recommended health-monitoring devices, road sensors, public-safety andsecurity devices, smart meters and personal fitness and health trackers for people and animals – dogs, cats, horses, cows and more. And then there are emerging IoT products that show how the urge to create connectivity extends to such prosaic items as toothbrushes, dental floss, hairbrushes, pillows, egg trays, wine bottle sleeves, baby monitors and changing tables, silverware, umbrellas, all manner of toys and sporting goods and remote-controlled pet food dispensers, to name a few…”

Brandy Shaul – “Follow this guide to stop users from seeing the pages, people and lists you follow on Facebook. Did you know Facebook allows you to stop users from being able to see the people, pages and lists you follow on the platform? Here’s how to change this privacy setting from within Facebook’s mobile application…”

The five best laptops your money can buy, just in time for tax rebates - Opinion piece on the five best laptops in time for tax year-end deductions

More fact-checking/verification guides
Three more for your collection: This one's from the Stockholm School of Economics. This nice chart from students at Santa Clara University was part of a class project. And here's a "yes or no" verification worksheet from Johnson & Wales University's website.

You won't believe this fake news fact-checking tip!
Writing for HuffPost, Caren Lissner offers an easy tip to determine whether a site is a fake-news factory or a legitimate news source: Notice how they correct their mistakes.

Did they really say that?
Storyzy has just launched a "quote-verifier tool" that checks quotes against a database of debatably reliable sources.  See the story in TechCrunch.